


Suzie Keeps Killing

by Nope



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-09
Updated: 2007-02-09
Packaged: 2018-11-02 22:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10954317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: Five ways Suzie Costello didn't die.





	Suzie Keeps Killing

**OR:**

She shoots Gwen as soon as she sees her. No hesitation. After that it's easy.

She can't go back to Torchwood, of course, she's on camera even now and Jack won't be far behind, but she's got the glove and the knife and what else is there? She just goes. Her files are already wiped. She changes car twice, takes a long way around by sewers. A change of clothes, change of hair, big glasses. Enough to avoid Tosh's face recognition software. It's not enough for forever, but it buys her the time she needs. All that sophistication, balked by something so simple. And wasn't that Torchwood all over?

The particular facility she's headed for has no metal detectors and a security guard so slow she's squirted him twice with her Retcon perfume before he's even registered the case in her hand. She already knows the floor plan, the room number, what she'll see inside. His life-signs are playing on her palmtop, recorded for replay, and she swaps the monitor leads with the briefest of blips. The shift nurse doesn't even notice -- and even if someone had, well, she has plans for that. She has plans for everything. So many plans for this.

Her father gurgles when the knife goes in, but that's nothing to noises he makes when she brings him back. There's something in his eyes, not recognition exactly, but something, a sort of animal understanding of the situation, anger and fear. She recognises the look. She had it herself, for far too long. This time she cuts his throat, watches blood spray, dribble, stop, and then she brings him back again. The glove is part of her, warm and melting so she can't tell where she ends and it begins, just knows how to reach out for that strand, how to tie it back into increasingly battered flesh.

She's killed him two dozen times before Jack kicks in the door. He lifts his gun. After that, it's easy.

 

**OR:**

Ianto was the only person who worked longer hours at the hub than she did. She should have suspected something long before she did, months before that tiny extra drain on the power got in the way of her analysis of the glove. She should have remembered Torchwood One. She should have, at the very least, remembered that the reason she always sent Ianto to pick stuff up was because she inevitably got lost in the tunnels that went on for miles and all looked exactly the same.

(She felt something like a click in the back of her skull and suddenly she understood Tosh's Zork references.)

The room had been well concealed, the locks carefully aged to make it look like it hadn't been touched in years. Not carefully enough for her, of course, but for other people. It was only after she'd gotten them open that she though to wonder why it had been set up like that and by that time Lisa had her. Rather, the machines that had Lisa had her. She could have believed it was an automated defence system, except she caught a glimpse of Ianto's white, determined face in the second before the needles punctured her eyeballs.

(She could detail the exact procedure now. It was easy with her fear centres removed.)

Someone sobbed an apology. She didn't care much. There were things poking around in her head but she'd been practicing on the glove for months now, and her psychic control was formidable. She knew who she was. She knew what she was, even as her joints were ripped apart, bones replaced with metal, extra support added, strength to take the weight, wire muscles to take the strain. Her brain, welded into skin of steel. Discovery meant simplicity, meant as much power could be taken as needed. Rebuilt, wholesale.

(The machine told her things, and that was good. Then it tried to tell her to do things.)

She came online. Optical sensors fed into electric nerves. Lisa looked almost satisfied. Was that an emotion? A flaw, then. She took care of it. Then, blood still slick on her shiny fingers, she took care of mewling little Ianto in the corner. Servos hummed when she moved. It was ... pleasant, she supposed. Aesthetically pleasing, in a cool, intellectual sort of way. She wondered if the glove would still work without flesh. Still, she could always build some. She could see it in her head now. She was always good with computers, with gadgets, with biology and chemistry. She was always brilliant at everything, just like daddy demanded.

(The machine raged. She ignored it, as she would the temper-tantrum of a three year old. She had plans of her own.)

The world didn't need upgrading. It needed reformatting. And she knew just where to begin.

 

**OR:**

"My father," she tells them, "was an agricultural engineer. I spent every summer on farms. I know the land, the crops and the animals. I know what they like, how they grow, the things they'll fight and fuck with. The things they'll feed on."

She tests the bonds. Tight, just like she expected. No way to get free.

"I know how to recognise the signs of predation. My father made sure I learnt every growth cycle, all the patterns of the seasons, not just weather but climate, years and years of it, decades of it. He taught me until I begged and then he laid the word on me and taught me some more. I understand obsession. I understand ritual."

She looks across the workbench. The axes are sharp, that dull shine of good use, every imperfection hammered and buffed out. A razor sharp blade on each instrument, easily enough to cut the bonds but so far out of reach. The pokers, red hot, ready to cauterise each vein and artery as they went. Everything read to keep the meat as fresh as possible.

"When I wasn't good enough, which was always, my father made me watch. Do you see? I understand. I do, I understand why you did what you did, to my friends and yours. What you gave up -- what you were made to give up. What you had to become. I understand survival. You see that, don't you? We're alike."

Eye contact is important. To establish a relationship. To make a connection, like with her glove. Her perfect glove.

"That's why I know you understand me," she says, and picks the knife up. "You understand why I have to do this. All those bodies. All those bones. All those people, part of you now. I just have to see what happens."

The farmer makes a strangled, unintelligible noise. She says sorry and drives the knife down.

 

**OR:**

It hadn't taken much to convince the members of Pilgrim to join in with the Weevil fight club. It leant a certain reality to their musing. It made them stronger. Harder. Many drifted away, of course, some even died. The others stayed. They grew lean. They grew strong. They understood what she had known since the beginning. Since daddy. Since the glove. Each resurrection taught them the same thing: there is only darkness. There was nothing out there. There was no big reward for their suffering. No pearly gates. No karma. No retribution or redemption. Nothing mattered. Nothing mattered at all. The only thing to do was to take what they could. Here and now. No need to worry about consequences, because there weren't any. Absolutely nothing. Jack didn't see it her way, of course, but she had an army of fanatics and well-trained Weevils at her back, and what was a six-shot Webley to that? They took Torchwood, then London. After that, the end was inevitable.

 

**OR:**

Attempt four-twenty-one-oh-five-sixty. Same as all the others. The life sign monitors drop to flat-line, hold for a while, jerk and start wobbling again. The corpse twitches, shudders, breathes.

"Sorry, Jack," she says, and cuts another mark in the stone. There's no paper left, of course. There's nothing much of anything left, except the two of them. Gwen Cooper's bones are bleached white by now. Hers and daddy's. Good riddance to them. "Not this time, either."

Not any time, but she'll keep going. What else is there? Just him and her, going on and on and on.

She writes it all down, of course. She's a scientist. She does things properly. With notes and figures and pictures and some really interesting videos, like that time she doused him in liquid oxygen every cell was super-frozen, smashed him into the smallest pieces she could manage and then torched the whole thing. It had taken him months to come back from that. A hundred and forty-two days. Longest death yet. Shooting between the eyes once every three minutes for an entire day had also been surprisingly satisfying. She might try that again sometime, if she could scrounge up some ammo. Maybe she'd let Jack die of radiation poisoning again while she searched.

It was her goddamn glove. He should never have tried to destroy it. Not even for Gwen Bloody Cooper.

"It was mine," she says. "Well, it's ours now, isn't it Jack? You, me, and endless bloody life."

"Suzie," Jack says.

And she kills him all over again.


End file.
